From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 7 6:36:55 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from clmboh1-smtp3.columbus.rr.com (unknown [65.24.0.112]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B3BE37B4EC for ; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 06:36:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.iowna.com (dhcp065-024-023-038.columbus.rr.com [65.24.23.38]) by clmboh1-smtp3.columbus.rr.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f17EULr18774; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 09:30:22 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3A815B87.6FED99AB@mail.iowna.com> Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2001 09:28:23 -0500 From: Bill Moran X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "O. Hartmann" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some conceptional questions about partition size References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "O. Hartmann" wrote: > We do not use a dedicated mailing service, sendmail is udefull for our purposes. > As I saw in the past, many system relevant informations are stored away in > /var, printing, some system's databases and especially /var/tmp. > > At this moment, I use a 2GB partition to keep all this informations, but I ran > into problems when users did big print jobs which are spooled and gzip.tar'ing > files. My question is: what is a reasonable size for /var? I don't know if there's any pat answer for that. Depending on what your system is doing will determine what size partition you need. I have a particular system that has a 500M /var partition and then a 3G /var/mail parition because the engineers/artists that work there are always sending/receiving tons of large emails. It's not unusual for a single mailbox to exceed 2M over the course of the day. > As we move now toward a RAID, several aspects shown above become irrelevant/obsolet. > So, my question for that is: is it a good task to "melt together" all > system's directories together into a big partition, say, mounted as / ? The big disadvantage to this is that if something being written to /var corrupts the filesystem, you could have an unbootable system. Whereas if / and /var are seperate, a corrupt /var filesystem will still allow boot, and you can fairly easily rebuild /var and get up and running again. Another reason I split filesystems is to achieve a simplified quota mechanism. For example, if the machine above were to get spammed with email that acutally filled the 3G partition, it would still be able to log to /var, wouldn't crash, and the other services (http, proxy, ftp) would continue uninterupted. I usually split by purpose. It sounds like you've got a good concept of what you want to do. You should probably quit second-guessing yourself. Another thing I try to do is always have some extra disk space in reserve. If I think I'll need 6G for a system, I make sure to get at least 8G drives. And I leave the last 2G of space unallocated. That way if I find I misjudged a filesystem size I can mount some extra space there quickly. > Linux seems to do the same way this task, but in many aspects I'm not familiar with > Linux' way of doing jobs and it seems that this very often aspects of security, > if there are really some, are not been payed attention of (English for the impatient, > sorry ...). Don't apologize, your English is pretty good. Hope this makes some sense, and I'm open to further discussion on the topic. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message